Santorum Viewed as Imprudent by the Right

Rick Santorum





Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize winning conservative columnist at the Washington Post published a recent op-ed piece called "The Trials of Saint Santorum."  In it she spoke admirably of Santorum's personal values, but dismissively of his judgment in describing them:

It is easy to pound Santorum, and no one makes it easier than Santorum himself. Nevermind that he invokes Satan, claiming that the “Father of Lies” has his sights on the United States, as Santorum did in 2008 at Ave Maria University in Florida. He has never met a question he wouldn’t answer or a combatant he wouldn’t engage. Thus, when a reporter asks whether he thinks states should be able to ban birth control, Santorum says yes, but . . .

HEADLINE!!! “Santorum says states should be able to ban birth control!!!”

Except that’s not what he meant, . . . Santorum was expressing a legal opinion, and his answer was within the context of whether states have any regulatory jurisdiction over the question. Otherwise, he has said repeatedly that he does not support banning contraceptives and that he would oppose any such efforts.

Everything stems from his allegiance to the Catholic Church’s teachings that every human life has equal value and dignity. The church’s objection to birth control is based on concerns that sex without consequences would lead to men reducing women “to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of (their) own desires,” as well as abuse of power by public authorities and a false sense of autonomy.

Within that framework, everything Santorum says and does makes sense, even if one doesn’t agree. When he says that he doesn’t think the government should fund prenatal testing because it leads to abortion, this is emotional Santorum, father of a disabled child and another who died hours after a premature birth. In both instances, many doctors would have recommended abortion, but Santorum believes that those lives, no matter how challenging, have intrinsic value.

Though Santorum’s views are certainly controversial, his biggest problem isn’t that he is out of step with mainstream America. His biggest problem is that he lacks prudence in picking his battles and his words. The American people are loath to elect a preacher or a prophet to lead them out of the desert of unemployment. And they are justified in worrying how such imprudence might translate in areas of far graver concern than whether Santorum doesn’t personally practice birth control.

 On Friday the National Review Editorial Board took a similar tack:

Critics of Senator Santorum’s moral and religious views, especially in the media, have not been wholly scrupulous about identifying what they are before attacking them. He has been described, falsely, as an advocate of banning contraception. A dated joke about birth control made by one of his major supporters has been treated as a campaign scandal. A remark about Obama’s misguided environmental “theology” has been turned into an insinuation that the president is not a Christian.

But the press has not had to invent controversial remarks by Santorum, who has supplied them himself. He has said that Satan is undermining America, in part by corrupting mainline Protestantism; that liberal versions of Christianity are distortions of the creed; that as president he would speak out against birth control, and that states should be free to prohibit it; and that John McCain “doesn’t have any” religious views.

Some of his comments are indefensible, and even some of Santorum’s defensible assertions would have been better left to someone else — someone not seeking the presidency — to say. Santorum’s remarks about Senator McCain were unwise and uncharitable. Nor do we need political leaders to share their theological judgments about the various denominations that call themselves Christian. There is no good reason for a prospective president to pledge to lecture Americans about contraception.

He seems serenely confident that with enough time he can change anyone’s mind on the issues. But he has not always shown that he knows how to pick his battles wisely, or that he understands that voters want a president with a suitably modest conception of a president’s proper role in national life. . . . The challenge before him is to marry his self-confidence to a more consistent exercise of discrimination and tact.